Category: Other

In my last blog, I wrote about libraries and the concept of a “service” as it is used in IT service management.

A few days ago, I chatted with the manager of the Ferndale Library and introduced myself as a new library trustee. The Ferndale Library is only a few miles from our house and I hang out there often. I mentioned that I am in the Ferndale Library often. My reputation as the new library trustee had preceded me. The manager said she had heard that the new trustee used the Ferndale Library WiFi for writing a book.

I was flattered that I have a reputation, but there was also something in this chat that I tie to service management. The truth is I don’t visit the library for the WiFi. The Internet is so much a part of my life that I have set up a network in our house that provides excellent Internet service, possibly better than the library.

If I don’t come for the WiFi, what do I come for? What service does the library offer that brings me to my favorite seat by the window?

It is a different service entirely, but a real service.

I wrote a good share my book, Cloud Standards, sitting at a table in the library. Sitting in a library helps me focus on writing. When I appear in the library, it is a sign that I have been procrastinating in my office at home and have come to the library to get some work done. I promised myself this summer that in 2013 I would complete a draft of the novel I am working on. Being the person that I am, I had to concentrate on fiction all of December to meet my self-imposed deadline. Consequently, I am a few chapters behind on my current technical book, Cloud Service Management, so the library will be seeing a lot of me this January.

The mission-critical service I get from the library is, for lack of a better word, the atmosphere. I have never seen this service provided anywhere but in a library. The service is complex. It involves the shelves of books, newspapers, and magazines. It grows from the murmur of earnest conversation. I am convinced that lady sitting across from me concentrating on her laptop, the fellow a few feet away studying the newspaper, the folks wandering through the shelves browsing for entertainment or practical information and advice, the varied band of users of the Internet terminals, the students hurrying to finish tomorrow’s homework, the librarians and pages tending the patrons and the collection, all these contribute to something I think Durkheim and later Jung called a “collective consciousness.” I struggled with Durkheim when I was an undergraduate and I’ve never been able to understand Jung, let alone explain him, but I believe the collective consciousness in a library helps me get my chapters written.

All libraries have it. I’ve been to London on business several times. I always skip the sights and find time to go to the reading room of the British Museum. My wife thinks I’m crazy, and she’s more than likely right, but some of the most profound and important concepts and words on this planet have been conceived and written in that space. I love to sit under the gilt and sky blue dome, reading and writing for as long as I can, occasionally pinching myself to check if I am really sitting in the room of intellectual titans.

The amazing thing is that the Ferndale Library, all the other libraries in the WCLS, and libraries everywhere deliver the same service. Can the service be enhanced, increased in value? Most services can, but I confess, I have only one thought on improving the mystery of the library: the atmosphere is collective, the more folks who know and use this service, the stronger it becomes. I’m looking forward to the new Ferndale library building, but even more, the new patrons I hope it will bring in.

I attended my second WCLS trustee’s meeting a couple of weeks ago. The main topic was the library budget and the contract with the library employee’s union. The contract is important because personnel accounts for nearly three quarters of the library expenditures. Library people have character. The negotiations were civil — unlike the histrionics to the south of us involving a certain well-publicized union contract rejection. I think the library results will prove to be satisfying to everyone.

The basics of operating WCLS are still new to me. It’s easy to forget that keeping the library staffed with the helpful people who unlock the value of the library to all comers is a very important job. Moving books as they are requested and returned from our spread out branches takes manpower and coordination.

I sympathize with skeptics who might wonder why buying books and other content is not more than a quarter of the budget. That seems to make sense, but it ignores something mission critical. A library full of books but lacking the people to make the books accessible is one hand clapping. It consumes resources, but there is no sound. A library is a service that puts books and book-related resources into people’s hands. That takes good people as well as good books.

Putting books into hands, especially hands that would not ordinarily have books, is the real job of the library. This is a noble thing and something worth being thankful for in this season of giving thanks.

To me, “the library” now means the Whatcom County Library System . Last week, the WCLS put out a press release announcing that I have become a trustee and a picture of me stares out from the front page of the library newsletter, Read On. I admit it—I am proud of that little article and I am happy to have become a trustee. I hope I do a good job and keep up my enthusiasm.

For the past few weeks, the director, Christine Perkins, has taken me on tours of the library system. This has been fun. Although I have lived in Whatcom County my entire life, for the last two decades, I have been distracted by a job that seemed to be everywhere but Whatcom County. According to my count, I’ve gone through 4 roll-aboards in my job and I’d prefer an impacted wisdom tooth to another redeye to Kennedy. Truthfully, in the last ten years I have visited the small towns of eastern Long Island that surround my former company’s headquarters more often than I have visited Blaine or Sumas in Whatcom County, so the tours were a revelation to me. The county has grown in many ways.

The road signs of Suffolk County, the eastern end of Long Island and most distant from New York City, have Indian names like Hauppauge, Ronkonkoma, and Amagansett, just as we have Nooksack, Sumas, and Lummi, but the small towns of Long Island are influenced more by New York City than Whatcom County is affected by either Seattle or Vancouver, even though Manhattan (referred to as “The City”) is about the same distance from Sag Harbor on the eastern end of the island as Bellingham is from Seattle. The Long Island Rail Road has a lot to do with the relationship between Manhattan and Suffolk County.

I like Long Island. It is not as rural as Whatcom County, but the towns are not that different. They have libraries like the towns of Whatcom County and people are friendly with a small town feel. Suffolk County is affluent, but my one venture into a Suffolk County library has proven to me that Whatcom County has nothing to be ashamed of in our library system.

Out of curiosity, I looked at the popular book list from Suffolk County Library this morning. Near the top is Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, a book about the Japanese internment in Seattle. It is a good book by a northwest author and well worth reading, although a tad on the sweet side in my hard-boiled opinion. It doesn’t appear on the WCLS most popular list, which amused me. Ford’s book disappeared from the New York Times list several months ago and disappeared from the WCLS page about the same time. It appears that Whatcom County is more in tune with the NYT best-seller list than Suffolk County.